Betsy DeVos complains about striking teachers during meeting with 2018 Teachers of the Year

President Donald Trump's education secretary has just made it clear to America's underpaid, striking schoolteachers that she is not on their side.

In front of more than 50 teachers named 2018 Teacher of the Year in their respective states on Monday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos decided to take on two contentious issues in education: teachers' strikes and charter schools.

Although DeVos' school choice agenda was a major topic of discussion — DeVos has long been an advocate of expanding access to charter schools and private schools through voucher programs, which public school officials worry will hurt their districts — the education secretary also expressed unflattering opinions about the teachers in various states who have gone on strike.

DeVos conveyed this view in response to a question about striking teachers by Josh Meibos, Arizona's teacher of the year. After telling Meibos that she could not "comment specifically to the Arizona situation," DeVos added that she wanted to see a situation in which "adults would take their disagreements and solve them not at the expense of kids and their opportunity to go to school and learn," according to audio published by The Huffington Post.

Lest there be any doubt as to DeVos' opinion that teachers who were striking were doing so at the expense of the children, she concluded that "I just hope we’re going to be able to take a step back and look at what’s ultimately right for the kids in the long term."

Given that DeVos has a sour relationship with teachers unions and her family has long opposed the efforts of organized labor, it is perhaps unsurprising to hear her express this opinion. Nevertheless, Montana's teacher of the year Melissa Romano was clear about her dismay.

"She basically said that teachers should be teaching and we should be able to solve our problems not at the expense of children. For her to say at the ‘expense of children’ was a very profound moment and one I’ll remember forever, because that is so far from what is happening," Romano told the Post.

The Arizona teachers strike itself may actually be nearing a resolution. Teachers there demanded increases in pay and student services at a time when the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, and the Republican-controlled legislature seemed unsympathetic to their concerns, according to Reuters. Although a deal between Ducey and state lawmakers doesn't give them everything they said they needed, the Arizona teachers nevertheless agreed to end their strike if that deal is passed into law. The deal in question would address teachers' concerns about inadequate pay (Arizona's teachers are among the lowest paid in the country) by increasing their pay by 20 percent by the year 2020, as well as increasing funding to public schools by $371 million over the next five years. The striking teachers also wanted a pay increase for support staff and a pledge that there would be no future tax cuts unless the Arizona education system's per-student funding level is increased to that of the national average.

Although the Arizona teachers strike was the one that prompted DeVos to speak out against teachers strikes in general, the Arizona pedagogues were actually acting as part of a larger wave of teacher protests that have occurred in 2018. The strike that kicked it all off was in West Virginia, where teachers were among the lowest paid in the country. As The New York Times reported after that strike ended in March:

The strike ground the state’s public schools to a halt for nine days, a remarkable show of defiance by the teachers in a state where the power of organized labor, once led by strong mining unions, has greatly diminished. Along the way, the teachers disregarded union leaders’ advice to return to work when the governor first promised them the raise last week, deciding in meetings at malls and union halls and in Facebook groups that they would stay out until their raise was enacted in law.

After the success of the statewide strike in West Virginia, other statewide teachers strikes and protests occurred in Oklahoma and Arizona. On a smaller level, there were various strikes and protests among school staff in Colorado, Kentucky and North Carolina, as well as a strike among school bus drivers in DeKalb County, Georgia.

The movement for teachers to protest has in some ways sprung up organically. For instance, in March a teacher from Jefferson County in Kentucky named Hallie Jones found that a Facebook group she created to express disgust with how teachers are underpaid in her state took off on its own.

"I set up the Facebook group around 9:30 and then I was looking at it and I was really confused because it had only been 20 minutes and there were 300 or 400 members," Jones told Salon in March. "And then it jumped up to 700. And I thought, 'Oh, there's another group!' And maybe I just clicked the wrong one. But now I'm in this bigger group. But then I realized the group that I had started went viral. So I was a little freaked out and things just happened. Now I woke up this morning and there were 7,200 people in the group."

It remains to be seen how each of these different strikes will pan out — some have been resolved, others not — but one point that is clear is that DeVos and other Republican politicians won't be able to keep ducking the issue. America needs good teachers in order to produce educated, hard-working future adults, and those teachers have a right to be well-compensated for their work. If conservative politicians keep saying no to their demands, teachers will continue refusing to work for a society that has decided to not be grateful to them.

DeVos also engaged in what was described by one teacher to the Huffington Post as a “verbal sparring session” with another teacher about her favored school choice policies. Jon Hazell, Oklahoma’s teacher of the year, a Republican who voted for President Trump, told DeVos that her policies favoring alternatives to traditional public schools were taking resources away from public districts, the Post reported:

DeVos told Hazell that students might be choosing these schools to get out of low-performing public schools, he said.

“I said, ‘You’re the one creating the “bad” schools by taking all the kids that can afford to get out and leaving the kids who can’t behind,’ ” Hazell said he told DeVos in response. (Hazell said he was not referring to DeVos specifically as creating the “bad” schools but to school choice policies generally.)